Cheating the Beautiful Game

In the sixty-ninth minute of the World Cup’s opening match, between Brazil and Croatia, with the score tied 1–1, the Brazilian striker Fred—players in Brazil typically go by their first names—went down in front of the opposing goal, seemingly shoved or tripped by a Croatian defender. Players from the Croatian team swarmed the referee to protest, but in vain; the referee gave the defender, Dejan Lovren, a yellow card and awarded the Brazilians a penalty kick. Neymar, a forward, briskly converted it, giving the Brazilians a permanent lead.

But, by then, even the television commentators were howling, as replays exposed the foul for what it actually was: a spectacular bit of theatre. Lovren had barely touched Fred, who nonetheless slid down on a pillow of air, his arms raised in mock protest even before he hit the ground. He’d faked it, to draw the penalty.

“Wait, what happened?” my wife asked, as we watched the replay once more. I found her incredulity touching. “Does that happen a lot?”

It does happen a lot. Supporters of any team will gladly point out the sport’s worst offenders, often implicating a rival team: the Irish (or Nigerians, or Uruguayans) are brutes! The Italians (or French, or Argentines) are cheats! Cristiano Ronaldo—Ronaldo’s name comes up a lot—is the world’s biggest flop artist! An article in today’s New York Times suggested that American soccer players are particularly poor at playacting, although it managed to quote only the opinions of American players.

But exactly how much cheating goes on in soccer, or whether any team or player really does more of it than any other, is hard to quantify. Perhaps the closest measure is a four-year-old study, still unpublished, by Chris Stride, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield. In 2010, Stride had two assistants watch, on playback, every minute of all sixty-four matches in that year’s World Cup.

“That’s a lot of watching,” Stride says. Stride instructed the aides to note every incident of cheating—the infractions caught by the referees and those that went unseen—and who did it to whom, when, and where on the field. “I was interested to see whether cheating in football is relative to the player as an individual, to the match situation, or to a team or national ethic,” Stride said. “The only way to do that was to collect some data.”

First, he had to define cheating. In soccer, all sorts of manhandling—jostling, obstruction, shirt pulling—goes on as a matter of course. Stride ignored that stuff, as well as offside violations, poorly timed tackles, and what he refers to in the study as “intentional rule violations due to a player losing his temper.” (Classic example: the headbutt that France’s striker Zinedine Zidane delivered to Marco Materazzi, of Italy, in the 2006 World Cup final, after Materazzi told Zidane, “I prefer the whore that is your sister.” Zidane was given a red card, and France lost on penalties.)

Instead, Stride focussed on the officially unfair schemes that players employ to win a strategic advantage for their team or to keep the opposing side from gaining one. He places these into two broad categories. First is what is known in soccer as the “professional foul”—a blatant attempt to stop or alter the opponent’s goal or attack. If their striker is making a beeline toward your goal, and you’re the last defender, you may find it necessary to collide with him at top speed or trip him from behind. If the ball is about to go into your net, maybe you use your hand to keep it out. If your team is ahead, there’s time to be wasted—by kicking the ball out of bounds, or by discovering that you need to stop and tie your laces. Such infractions can draw a yellow or even a red card. But players commit them regardless, for the larger good of the team.

Then there’s what Stride calls “classic cheating” or “simulation cheating”—flops, dives, players writhing with pains that magically evaporate the moment the referee looks away. In some respects, classic cheats are just the inverse of, and perhaps a natural response to, professional fouls: the former are typically committed by attackers, Stride found, to get the defenders in trouble, while the latter are largely committed by defenders against attackers.

Over all, Stride counted three hundred and ninety incidents of cheating, or about six per ninety-minute match. Three-quarters of them were professional fouls, eighty-seven per cent of which were caught by the referees. The rest was classic cheating, and it mostly went undetected by the refs—no surprise, perhaps, since the whole point of deception is to deceive. Some teams were indeed bigger offenders than others: Brazil had one of the top rates of professional fouls (three and a half incidents per game), while Portugal, Chile, and Italy shared the highest rate of classic cheating (two incidents per game). Of the players, the top two fakers were Abdul Kader Keïta, of Ivory Coast, and Cuauhtémoc Blanco, of Mexico; the third was Cristiano Ronaldo.

Stride noted that although a professional foul technically counts as cheating—rules are broken—most people don’t see it that way. “It’s considered against the rules but not against the ethos of the game,” he said. In a companion study in 2010, Stride polled more than five hundred supporters of World Cup teams and found that “viewers dislike classic cheating a lot more than professional fouls,” he said. “A small majority of fans were quite happy to see their team commit a professional foul if it would stop a goal.” But more than seventy per cent disapproved of players, even from their own team, who faked an injury, exaggerated an injury, dived in pursuit of a penalty kick, or used their hand to score a goal. “Exaggerating an injury was particularly bad.” In effect, cheating was cheating if it led to a goal but not if it stopped one.

It’s tempting to say that cheating is more prevalent than ever, but it’s probably just more visible. The game is more popular and more widely televised, in higher resolution and slower motion, with casual and professional analysts alike eager to linger on the beautiful game’s least attractive moments. The visibility is also a disincentive; players can be fined or banned retroactively for fouls that the referee may have missed the first time around. And the old days weren’t exactly idyllic: the 1966 World Cup, held in England, has been called “the most violent World Cup” because the officials elected to call fewer fouls, presumably (at least according to South American players) to level the field against more technically skilled South American teams. “It was as if the referees had swallowed their whistles,” the retired Brazilian star Pelé writes in his new memoir, “Why Soccer Matters.”

If soccer has a real cheating problem, it’s upstairs. The Federation Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, which governs professional soccer worldwide and runs the World Cup, has been accused of ignoring extensive evidence of match-fixing in recent years. Last year, Europol, the European Union’s police intelligence agency, pointed to six hundred and eighty matches between 2008 and 2011, including World Cup qualifiers, whose results it deemed suspicious. Two weeks ago, Scotland’s National Crime Agency began investigating a recent friendly match between Scotland and Nigeria, after a widely seen video clip seemed to show the Nigerian keeper tossing the ball into his own net.

Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that key FIFA officials were bribed into awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s seventy-eight-year-old president, recently called the decision to select Qatar “a mistake,” only to reverse himself and blame the controversy on “racism” and “discrimination.” Last week, over the objections of European soccer officials, Blatter decided to run for a fifth term as FIFA’s president. He more than anyone must be glad for the current World Cup to be underway, to distract us from the sins committed in pursuit of the next Cups.

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